A tale of two datasets

This week, the user (on Twitter and Reddit) @hiulit announced their new twitter bot, Godot Scraper:

The bot regularly tweets the newest Godot games on itch, which is great if you wanna keep an eye on new Godot game releases, like I do.

So far so good.

The problem came when they also published this chart, using the scraper data:

A couple of things about this grabbed my attention immediately:

1. Who is JafCraze? I don't have that name in my top devs at all
2. I had JohnGabrielUK as the number one Godot dev on itch with 23 games back in January, so why does he have only 20 games on that list?

So I went in an check the data the scraper collects, and lo and behold: Godot Scraper had more games collected than I do. Ouch.

@hiulit did something I was too lazy to do, even tho I knew I should: he went for games using the Godot tag on top of the made-with-godot games. There's a lot of overlapping, but even then, with over 4,000 tagged Godot games on itch, the total number Godot Scraper holds is 10,423.

That's why users like JafCraze, literally the most prolific Godot dev on the platform, were completely invisible to me all this time. I always just assumed that every dev making so many games with the same engine was also putting that engine on their tool list.

well, JafCraze doesn't use the tools data at all, only tags. My bad 😂.

One mystery solved!

But that presented me with a challenge: I had to get my hands on all the data I was missing!

I knew already I couldn't just use Godot Scraper's data. I have known the project for a while now and I know it doesn't show 'Published' dates. That probably is an itch thing. Itch is weird when it comes to dates.

And because I need the dates so much, I need to just rework my own solution and get those Godot Tags.

So I did it. Mostly out of pettiness.

I got every game using the Godot, Godot-Engine and GodotEngine tags on itch.

That took me up to where the Godot Scraper was. But I already have some extra games from another source: Godot-only game jams.

I've talk about it a couple of times before. Games with no tools (or tags) showing they were made with Godot. Nothing, except that they are entries on Godot exclusive jams.

So I added those to the pile and clean them up. I then checked the final number and:

11,852 games

That's right! Take that Godot Scraper! I'm beating its tally by 1,493 games. So I can once again reclaim the title of holder of the best Godot data in all the land.

But that still doesn't show mystery number 2: Why doesn't JohnGabrielUK have more games? why only 20?

I'm not too clear on that. I have to be honest, I only took a quick peek at Godot Scraper's code, I have to go into that after this.

What I do, just to be clear, is check the "Author", for solo devs, or "Authors", for teams, on the games metadata. And that's what I'm using for this chart, now counting all the games I have:

JafCraze: I'm sorry for ignoring you all these months! I'm really glad Godot Scraper was created so I could notice my idiotic mistake sooner rather than lather. Freaking amazing project, do keep an eye on it.

2021 in Numbers

This also works as a 2021 Q4 report. So let's show the full year first:

This was a fantastic year for Godot in terms of number of games. 1,892 more than last year, with June as the biggest month ever for the engine on Itch.

Here's how the year by year chart looks like know, with all those sweet new games added in:

The biggest difference this year tho, by a wide margin, came from Godot jams: 1,565 games total, from the Godot Wild Jams, GoGodot jams, Gotm.io's three jams on Itch, the Stop Waiting for Godot jam and the Fire Charity Jam:

The Godot wild jam still remains the top player overall, with twelve events. But the GoGodot Jams (two events) and the Stop Waiting For Godot Jam (one event, biggest Godot event of the year) took almost a quarter of all the games of the year each.

Disclaimer: the total entries on each jam are a little misleading I think, because the jams keep all the entries on a list, even if the game gets deleted down the line. There are a lot of missing/password protected entries, even tho the official numbers are the same (at least for a while?). So, the total is lower than the 1,562 games you would get if you add up those jams.

How did Steam do?

Pretty freaking well too. Unlike with Itch, I didn't go all out to find every single game on the platform, I just use SteamDB's tool and call it a day. I will be updating this in the near future with the lists of games on Steam like the "Is it made with Godot" curator page.

📰 Godot news round-up

Top-rated entries from Game Off 2021

Seven Godot Engine entries made it to the list:

• Bendyworm By @Bauxitedev
• Hivemind By @Raformatico, @BuendiaGames, @jjramos, Fran Arroyo
• godot_platformer.exe By @TheWinrawr
• Bumblebee Blitz By @nisovin
• Cordyception By @nwallenfang, @nheeb
• Memoria Castaway By @tpeng3, @ethverie
• Squorm By @MrBundles

If you wanna look at another list of Godot games from Game Off, here's a Twitter thread by @Akien

Godot Photo realistic Demo

You may have seen this one already. It has been making the round for the last couple of days.

Today it was even picked by gamesfromscratch.

Dev snapshot: Godot 3.5 beta 1

we're starting the beta testing phase with this already significant set of changes, and we'll have frequent beta builds to polish them for the stable release. Some more features are still being worked on and will be included in future beta builds.

and again, gamesfromscratch already released a video about it (while I was preparing this issue, in fact) so here you have it. Much better than whatever explanation I could give you:

If you have anything you want to share with the Godot development community please let me know by sending an email to contact@godotes.com